Braille books painstakingly published for the blind

Agnes Winarti ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Thu, 10/09/2008 10:22 AM  |  City

BRAILLE PRINTING: Teacher Cucu Nuraeni checks a page printed in Braille. The Braille book production at the school for the visually impaired in Lebak Bulus is currently operated by five teachers who volunteer after their scheduled class hours. (JP/Agnes Winarti)

Resource centers for the blind are facing difficulties keeping up with good reading material for the sightless, with a mushrooming number of publications available.

Aside from providing advocacy, counseling, training and academic tutorials for blind students, these resource centers also translate common books into Braille which they then re-print for blind readers.

In a recent interview, Cucu Nuraeni, vice principal of SLB-A Pembina Tingkat Nasional special school for the blind (on Jl. Pertanian Raya, South Jakarta) told The Jakarta Post that character conversions from common alphabets into Braille only took a few seconds using a computer program. However, she said, more time was needed to retype the content of books into Microsoft Word.

Cucu said, "We need support from book publishing firms to make soft copies of their books available, so we can reproduce Braille versions faster."

SLB-A has only 68 students and around 60 staff, 39 of whom are teachers. However, only five of the 39 teachers currently work on Braille translations after class, and they could only complete four titles a month due to limited human resources and budget, said Cucu, who is one of SLB-A's five volunteer teachers.

As of last year, the school's resource center (established in 1999) had made about 30,000 Braille book reproductions, SLB-A principle Kartini said. Around 70 percent of these were textbooks, while the remainder were children's story books, said Cucu, who has been a teacher at SLB-A since 1984.

The school prioritizes translations of books its students need, Kartini said, while blind students from other schools could also request reproductions of selected textbooks for a voluntary fee.

"We are not commercial. The amount parents choose to pay for material they use is entirely up to them," she said.

Under the 2002 copyright law, the reproduction of works of science, art or literature into Braille characters for the blind is permissible, provided it is not for commercial purposes.

As one of nine resource centers established nationwide, SLB-A has 10 Braille printers, of which only four are currently operable for maintenance reasons. The eight other centers in Indonesia are located in Cimahi, West Java; Payakumbuh, Sumatra; Makasar, Sulawesi; Bantul, Yogyakarta; Pemalang, Bali; Lawang, East Java; and Lombok.

All nine centers reportedly have their own Braille printers, but whether they are still operable is unknown.

BRAILLE PICTURE: Cucu displays a page of a Braille book containing an embossed picture of a protractor. (JP/Agnes Winarti)

SLB-A previously sent reproduced Braille works to dozens of smaller resource centers around Indonesia, Cucu said, but had stopped doing so in the last two years to cut costs.

Mitra Netra Foundation public relations officer Aria Indrawati had similar concerns about the slow reproduction of Braille books.

"The blind are not yet a priority for the government. There has not been any sustainable or comprehensive policy to support the blind, let alone to make more Braille books available," Andra said.

Mitra Netra Foundation currently has some 1,100 Braille books and more than 3,000 digital talking books.

"We endeavor to provide our clients with both forms of each book, but reproducing books into Braille is much more involved and costly than making digital talking books," Andra said.

"We need between two to four months to reproduce a book into Braille characters, depending on its thickness. Most of this process spent in retyping content."

Since January 2006, under a program called Books for the Blind, the foundation invited around 500 volunteers from across the archipelago and from around the globe, to assist in retyping the content of around 1,100 books.

"We welcome any volunteers who are willing to spend some of their time helping to retype books for us," Aria said.

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